“Chess?”
“Yes.” His wife—he never used her name and Thea never asked, just as they barely mentioned his children—had played chess since her schooldays and was very, very good. A winner. Beyond her children, it was all she cared about. Now, here, she missed her team, missed the opportunities chess would have brought her in India and, above all, she feared that her promise as a regional and even national player was shrinking as she sat in Baghdad, the hours of her day dictated by her husband’s schedule, with no known chess players in sight. He suspected he should forsake his own considerable prospects for her considerable gift, yet he could not, he told Thea. He had worked too hard and achieved too much in a few short years, and it would be dangerously premature to ditch his own potential for some regional hotel in India. He had to think of his children’s prospects, also, and the life he could give them. Besides, Oman was more home to him than India, and if ever he were to give up the world for a small business, he could do it only in Oman. And so, behind good parenting, conflict raged. “The queens and the kings and the pawns are stacked against me,” he said. “Checkmate lies ahead, I fear.”
Another Friday, another trip—troglodyte caves in the desert, and this time Sachiv joined them. It was his day off, but Thea had no idea why Reggie had asked him along until, as they left the Baghdad checkpoints behind, she heard her boss say, “So how long will your wife be away?”
“About a month,” Sachiv replied. “She’s gone to see her mother. It is lonely for her here, with small children and no family support. I work quite long hours.”
“‘Quite’?” Reggie glanced at him. “You live in that hotel!”
“But wouldn’t she prefer to escape the summer heat?” Kim asked.
“She will go then also. July, August. That is when it is worst for the children.”
Thea leaned forward. “How bad is it exactly? This heat.”
He looked over his shoulder. “It becomes very intense.”
“But air-conditioning. . . .”
He dipped his head. “Air-conditioning, yes, but air-conditioners often don’t work, and then there are the blackouts.”
“August is a nightmare here,” said Reggie. “There’s no other way of putting it.”
“I wanna go home!” Kim wailed.
“It must be worse than hell at the front,” he added.
A few hours later they left the tarmac and headed toward an extraordinary square-shouldered sandstone mound, marked by a neat row of openings gouged out of its façade.
“It looks like a prehistoric apartment building,” said Kim.
“Or a liner,” said Thea.
Reggie pulled up. “Welcome to the al-Tar Caves.”
“Can we get up there?”
“If the troglodytes could, we can.”
A scramble up gritty, sliding ground led them to the rectangular entrances that opened onto a warren of cold corridors with caves on either side. Thea shivered. “More like graves than homes.”
Leaning over to look through one of the low windows, Kim asked, “But what did they live on, stuck up here?”
“It would have been greener back then,” said Reggie.
“And it was safe.” Sachiv leaned over to look out also. “They could see their enemies coming.” His watch, slightly loose, was resting against his wrist bone.
“Let’s go up top,” said Reggie.
“. . . including a perfect rooftop terrace,” Geoffrey was saying when Thea and Sachiv, breathless, brought up the rear, “with spectacular views.”
“Wow,” she said. “I’d gasp if I wasn’t gasping already.” Pulling her blazer tighter against the breeze, she wandered farther along the ridge. In one direction, a maze of flat-topped sandstone hills, sculpted by the wind, looped around one another, creating spaghetti canyons, and in the other, the great expanse of Lake Razzaza, bare as a bald pate, shimmered. There was no definition, no way of telling desert and water apart, or where the lake met the dusky sky. The wind pushed strands of hair across Thea’s open mouth. Before her: infinity.
Then, down there, far off, the air stirred. In the corridor of desert between the caves and the lake, her eyes caught movement. A flutter. It looked at first like a low cloud, a cushion of dust. She stared, focused. . . . Camels. Though their shapes were indistinct, their gait was not: the long, graceful strides and the easy speed were undeniably those of camels, a line of them, moving across the plain. Stick figures, barely discernible, walked beside and ahead of them in a kind of mist. It was biblical. Astonishing. Here, everything she had ever sought was delivered: the pale kiss of the earth. The void and the grandeur, the singular and the particular, the stillness set around those camels loping across the flat in single file, conquering whole worlds with each step. All this, nebulous as a mirage, made nonsense of time. Lifting her chin to call the others, Thea thought better of it. She didn’t even raise her camera. Better to consign it to memory, this silent tableau, this apotheosis, so that she could savor it later, and often. The silence was peculiar. The herders must have been calling to their beasts and the camels must have been grunting and complaining, but the wind didn’t carry any of that. Standing atop a prehistoric sandcastle, she watched the procession, elated. Where had they come from? Where were they going? Was she looking back in time? Or forward?
Because of the
